Behavioural Correlation for Detecting P2P Bots

Abstract

In the past few years, IRC bots, malicious programs which are remotely controlled by attackers through IRC servers, have become a major threat to the Internet and for users. These bots can be used in different malicious ways such as issuing distributed denial of services attacks to shut down other networks and services, keystrokes logging, spamming,traffic sniffing cause serious disruption on networks and users. New bots use peer to peer (P2P) protocols start to appear as the upcoming threat to Internet security due to the fact that P2P bots do not have a centralized point to shutdown or trace back, thus making the detection of P2P bots is a real challenge. In response to these threats, we present an algorithm to detect an individual P2P bot running on a system by correlating its activities. Our evaluation shows that correlating different activities generated by P2P bots within a specified time period can detect these kind of bots.